Buying a cargo van in Scotland? Felt right.
Buying a hair dryer with a UK plug? Suddenly overwhelming.
Fear has a funny way of showing up in the day-to-day, no matter what your life looks like.
The big stuff isn't what gets you
We packed our lives into an Airstream and drove away from everything we knew. We've crossed borders, navigated foreign healthcare systems, and rebuilt a vintage trailer from the ground up. I drove Colletta through Manhattan. James towed her up the Alaska Highway.
None of that felt as scary as it sounds.
But standing in a Scottish hardware store, trying to figure out which adapter I needed for a hair dryer, with two tired kids pulling at my jacket and a queue forming behind me, that's when the fear arrived. Not the big, cinematic kind. The small, suffocating kind that whispers: you don't belong here, you're out of your depth, what were you thinking.
It's the everyday moments that expose the cracks. Not the ones you prepare for, but the ones that catch you off guard.
Doing it anyway
So I drove the van anyway.
The 2019 Sprinter we found on Gumtree and bought to help with the renovation (and eventually convert into a campervan). I'd been avoiding driving it for weeks, finding reasons to let James handle it while I sat in the passenger seat pretending to navigate.
But one morning he was busy, and we needed supplies from the mainland, and there was no one else to do it. So I climbed in, adjusted the mirrors, took a breath, and drove.
The views were beautiful, as always. We finally have two back windows, a small victory that felt enormous. And I absolutely devoured that celebratory pizza when I got home.
The pattern I keep noticing
Here's what five years on the road has taught me about fear: it rarely shows up where you'd expect it. It's not in the big decisions (those come with enough adrenaline and excitement to override the doubt). It's in the small, daily, unglamorous moments. The ones nobody sees. The ones that don't make the caption.
Calling a plumber in a country where the plumbing terminology is different. Enrolling the kids in a swimming class when you don't know anyone. Showing up at the cottage and realizing you have no idea where to start.
These are the moments that make me want to retreat. To call my mom. To Google "flights back to California."
But they're also the moments that, looking back, made me braver. Not braver in the sense that the fear went away. Braver in the sense that I stopped waiting for it to.
What's an everyday thing you've done recently that felt scary but you did it anyway?
I'm asking because I think we don't celebrate these moments enough. The big milestones get the confetti: the 50th state, the cottage purchase, the dramatic life change. But the real courage lives in the mundane. In driving the van. In buying the hair dryer. In showing up, every day, in a life that asks more of you than you thought you had.
You're doing it. Even when it doesn't feel like it.
Especially when it doesn't feel like it.
